LINKS - January 17th, 2024
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human. LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Two warring visions of AI
“On the board of the nonprofit that owns OpenAI were a number of thinkers who believe AI could lead to the destruction of humanity. Such thinkers are known as “doomers”, and their concerns focus on the risk that advanced AIs could decide to eliminate humanity, either in order to gain more power or prevent further environmental degradation. Opposing the doomers are the accelerationists, who believe the AI-enabled future is one where rapid scientific achievement will help conquer the great problems facing mankind. Believing that AI will save lives, accelerationists argue that we owe it to future generations to speed up the progress of AI research.”
The Mediterranean Diet Really Is That Good for You. Here’s Why.
By Dani Blum, The New York Times
“‘It’s one of a small number of diets that has research to back it up,’ said Dr. Sean Heffron, a preventive cardiologist at NYU Langone Health. ‘It isn’t a diet that was cooked up in the mind of some person to generate money. It’s something that was developed over time, by millions of people, because it actually tastes good. And it just happens to be healthy.’”
What Is “Natural” for Human Sexual Relationships?
“Cultural differences can overtake biological foundations, as numerous historical cases evidence. For example, ancient texts indicate that men imposed monogamy upon women—but not necessarily on themselves—when agriculture emerged in several regions around the globe. As historian Stephanie Coontz has argued, farming lifestyles created notions of private property, which extended in some places to greater subjugation of women. In the early farming societies of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, wedding rings, worn by the wife, symbolized that she was owned by her husband. Patriarchs from the Bible’s Old Testament such as Jacob and David had multiple wives.”
Why strive? Stephen Fry reads Nick Cave’s letter on the threat of computed creativity
From aeon
“In the events series Letters Live, performers read notable letters – old and new, original and written by others – in front of a live audience. In this video, as part of the Letters Live event at London’s Royal Albert Hall in November 2023, the British comedian and writer Stephen Fry reads a letter by the Australian musician Nick Cave on what Cave sees as ChatGPT’s potential to erode the human soul – with the AI chatbot presumably also standing in for any other generative AI systems that might replace human-created art. As Cave’s letter articulates how foregoing the struggle of creation risks destroying the ‘collective, essential and unconscious human spirit’, his characteristically masterful writing combined with Fry’s powerful reading serve as a reminder of the value and vitality of human creativity.”
Reality has no fundamental level
By Ross Cameron, iai news
“But perhaps reality has no foundation. Atoms, it turned out, could be divided into protons, neutrons and electrons, which it turned out could be further divided into quarks. Maybe we can keep going, further dividing and further dividing without ever reaching an end. Perhaps, as Leibniz thought, our material world depends on an entirely mental realm. But perhaps, as Leibniz did not think, that mental realm depends on some other material world, which itself depends on yet another mental realm, and so on. Perhaps we will break open a quark to find something even smaller, and perhaps we will break that open to find . . . our entire universe! (Like Borges’ Aleph.) Why rule out the possibility of infinite regress in the composition of reality, whether that be infinitely many distinct layers, each more fundamental than the previous, or whether it be reality going in a circle, such that if you dig down far enough you discover the universe as a whole?”